Let’s go back to 1956, Benjamin Bloom with Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Known as Bloom’s taxonomy this consists of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.
At about the same time Richard Feynman came up with the phrase, ”What I can’t explain, I don’t understand”.
( Feynman also came up with the equally famous, “Nobody understands quantum mechanics” but he clearly says here he’s joking. Quantum mechanics describes how Nature works, predicts how it will work but cannot answer the question of why it is like that.)
So the idea of this newsletter is that I explain (or someone famous like Feynman, Lessing, Orwell, Musk, explains something), you understand it, then you teach it to someone else (your child, sibling, neighbour) so that you find out if you really understand it.
This is the principle of the mixed age/ability groups in Montessori schools and in Elon Musk’s school.
As a long aside, the interviewer’s nervous laugh when Musk says he’s created his own school could come straight out of, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman.
That was my introduction to the graduate “College” at Princeton, where all the students lived. It was like an imitation Oxford or Cambridge—complete with accents (the master of residences was a professor of “French littrachaw”). There was a porter downstairs, everybody had nice rooms, and we ate all our meals together, wearing academic gowns, in a great hall which had stained-glass windows. So the very afternoon I arrived in Princeton I’m going to the dean’s tea, and I didn’t even know what a “tea” was, or why! I had no social abilities whatsoever; I had no experience with this sort of thing. So I come up to the door, and there’s Dean Eisenhart, greeting the new students: “Oh, you’re Mr. Feynman,” he says. “We’re glad to have you.”
So that helped a little, because he recognized me, somehow. I go through the door, and there are some ladies, and some girls, too. It’s all very formal and I’m thinking about where to sit down and should I sit next to this girl, or not, and how should I behave, when I hear a voice behind me. “Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?” It’s Mrs. Eisenhart, pouring tea. “I’ll have both, thank you,” I say, still looking for where I’m going to sit, when suddenly I hear “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.” Joking? Joking? What the hell did I just say? Then I realized what I had done. So that was my first experience with this tea business.
Later on, after I had been at Princeton longer, I got to understand this “Hehheh-heh-heh-heh.” In fact it was at that first tea, as I was leaving, that I realized it meant “You’re making a social error.” Because the next time I heard this same cackle, “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh,” from Mrs. Eisenhart, somebody was kissing her hand as he left.